DIT, NGI & IMMA win multi-million European research grant

Press Release: January 2011

DECIPHER project wins €4.2m European research grant

DECIPHER, a multi-million research project supported by the European Union to help people learn more about the art collections in museums and galleries, was launched in the National Gallery of Ireland yesterday (20 January 2011).

The project, which is led by the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) Digital Media Centre, won first place among 90 other research proposals to the EU. It involves partners from the UK, Italy and the Czech Republic as well as the National Gallery of Ireland, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Alanari, the world’s oldest photographic archive.

The DECIPHER project will devise new solutions to a range of narrative construction, knowledge visualisation and display problems.

Eoin Kilfeather, Project Co-Ordinator, said: “Most Irish and European cultural institutions have some sort of online presence, however one challenge for visitors is that the art works shown on museum and gallery websites tend to be isolated from each other and are then just given brief descriptions. The main reason that tours and exhibitions are often requested is that the tour guide puts the art in context and tells a story, which encompasses not just individual artworks, but the relationships between them and often gives insight into the artists’ lives. The software we are building aims to help people explore these kinds of narrative on the web.”

Raymond Keaveney, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, said: “We are delighted to be involved in a project that will result in new ways to explore curatorial practice and develop the potential benefits of technology for the museum sector.”